Now that so many of our policymakers consider standardized testing the ultimate measure and goal of education, it is a good time to step back and remember how error-prone these instruments are.
Fortunately there is a new website that is collecting truly stupid test questions.
In my seven years on the NAEP board, I saw many questions with two good answers or none.
Be sure to read it and submit your own entry.
Here is the full schedule and details for the organized protest against corporate education reform and high-stakes testing on April 4-7 in Washington, D.C.
I will speak on Thursday afternoon.
There is a stellar lineup of speakers and events.
Please come to Washington if you can.
Gary Rubinstein noticed a burst of TFA tweets making dramatic claims. They said that a new study found that students of TFA teachers gained one year more than teachers with same experience, and that middle students gained a half year more from TFA teachers than from other new teachers.
Gary read the study and found that these dramatic claims were over hyped.
In eight comparisons, five showed no statistically significant difference.
In the middle school study, the students in TFA classrooms got two extra questions right on a 40 question test. The amazing one-year of alleged gains were based on three more questions right.
Gary concludes:
“I think that TFA needs to back off on the miracle stories. The fact is that new TFA teachers are not much better, if they even are any better, than new non-TFA teachers. Neither are that good, really. Teaching has a big learning curve, but by the time you figure it out, you generally have to wait until next year to have a fresh start with a new group. As far as alumni teachers, yes, I think they are generally pretty good. I’d let an alum teach my kids. But as good as they might be, to ignore the fact that most of the comparisons were pretty neutral and then buy into the idea that when one group of students learns a year more than another group, they will only get, on average, three more questions correct on a multiple choice math test, well that’s the kind of thing that is going to keep me investigating these kinds of claims and spreading the word.”
This is big news.
State Senator Dan Patrick, the chair of the Senate Education Committee in Texas, wants to reduce the number of tests needed to graduate from the current 15 to “only” four or five.
At present, students in Texas must pass 15 tests to graduate. Yes, you read that right: 15.
That is more testing than any other state in the nation.
Texas is test-mad.
Maybe it is because Pearson hired the best lobbyists in the state, led by the architect of NCLB, Sandy Kress.
Kress writes op-eds in the Austin newspapers about the glories of standardized testing, but he is never identified as a paid lobbyist for Pearson.
In 2011, the Legislature cut the budget for public education by $5.4 billion (that’s BILLION), but managed to find $488 million for a five-year contract for Pearson.
This year, the state announced that it actually has a huge surplus, more than $8 billion, but there is no talk of restoring the cuts.
Methinks Senator Patrick has been hearing from parents in his district.
Methinks he may have noticed the Save Texas Schools rally in front of the state capitol on February 23, where 10,000 or more students, parents, and educators spoke out against budget cuts, high-stakes testing, and privatization.
At least he heard the part about the testing. Or so it seems.
In this brilliant essay, John Prosser dissects Michelle Rhee’s attack on the teachers of Garfield High School in Seattle.
The teachers decided unanimously to boycott the MAP test for their students.
On March 6, Rhee wrote (or someone in her organization wrote) an opinion piece in a Seattle newspaper making false claims about the teachers and what they were doing and why they were doing it.
She first refers to them as “union members,” not as teachers, immediately suggesting that they are acting from selfish motives, to do something that their union wants, rather than acting as teachers, in the best interest of their students.
She claims that the teachers don’t want to give the test because they don’t want to be evaluated, but the tests don’t figure into their evaluation.
As Prosser shows, she engages in ad hominem attacks; she makes factual errors; she equivocates; she misleads; she uses the straw man argument and the red herring. Her article demonstrates how little she knows, how quick she is to attack teachers while pretending to praise them, and how little respect she has for teachers and students.
As the leader of a group called “StudentsFirst,” Rhee evidently thinks that what students need most is more testing. She thinks that she cares about students more than those who work with them every day in their classrooms. She, who pours millions of dollars into political campaigns for vouchers, charters, teacher-bashing, and high-stakes testing, has some nerve attacking the dedicated teachers of Garfield High School.
The teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle are our heroes. They have true courage. They truly put their students first.
Please see this picture. It shows what is truly sick about U.S. education today.
It proves again that a photograph is worth 10,000 words.
In the midst of debate about whether to confirm Hanna Skandera as State Secretary of Education, the New Mexico State Senate voted to eliminate the school grading system that Skandera had created.
No one understood it.
She said it was designed by “experts,” but even one of her spokesmen admitted that very few people understood how it worked.
Its key feature was that test scores determine a school’s grade.
Here is an idea: everyone at the upper levels of the New Mexico Public Education Department should take the high school test in math and publish their scores.
And so should every state senator who voted to support the school grading system.
Jason Stanford writes a great blog about Texas politics. He has developed a special interest in education. After all, Texas was once home to the “Texas miracle,” and gave the nation No Child Left Behind.
In this column, he reports on what happened when a friendly legislator tried some questions on the fifth grade math test and found the wording to be confusing. He gave the same question to some of his colleagues, and the language puzzled them too. People with law degrees couldn’t understand the question. What should have been a straightforward math question turned into a verbal tangle because of the way the question was posed.
Pearson has a nearly $500 million contract with the state of Texas. Parents are furious. Legislators are thinking of canceling the contract.
This question does Pearson no good.
An incisive essay posted on Valerie Strauss’s blog explains how we can use George Orwell’s classic 1984 to understand corporate-style school reform today.
The essay, written by North Carolina teacher Chris Gilbert, demonstrates that Orwell perfectly understood how lies, repeated often, tend to be accepted as truthful. Corporate reformers say the same things over and over again, expecting that in time their echo chamber will win out. Or, as Orwell puts it, “Myths which are believed in tend to become true.”
Gilbert gives as an example the familiar reformer claim that poverty doesn’t cause poor school performance, but “failing” schools and “bad” teachers do. We have heard this in one form or another from Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Rhee, and Arne Duncan. He offers this example:
“In a recent interview with TIME, Bush was asked, “What’s the role of poverty in education?” He responded, “I would reverse the question: education impacts poverty, not the other way around.”
Implicit in Gilbert’s essay is another point: Fiction can teach us as much about the present as non-fiction, sometimes even more. It is always amazing to young people–and to readers of all ages–to discover how a work written 65 years ago speaks loud and clear to us today. One could make the same points in “informational text,” but not with the same power as in a novel like 1984. That is the definition of a classic. It speaks to us across ages and continents, across time and space. It is as alive today as when it was written.
Please read this article that appears in the latest issue of the journal of the New York State School Board Association.
It describes how many teachers, principals, and superintendents are feeling overwhelmed by the changes raining down on them.
Then comes these paragraphs:
“John King is on the wrong side of history,” author and blogger Diane Ravitch told On Board. “He is acting like a petty dictator, threatening to hurt the children to retaliate against the adults who did not do his bidding.”
“On the other hand, “If you don’t put teeth into the system, no change is going to happen,” said Allison Armour-Garb, who served as chief of staff to former Education Commissioner David Steiner and is one of the architects of New York’s accountability system.
“Although the Obama administration’s approach is research-based, the RTTT states are the first to take it to scale, Armour-Garb noted. “I’m confident that the Common Core, data-driven instruction, and teacher and principal evaluation are going to lead to improvement in student outcomes – over time.”
“Armour-Garb has a personal interest in school accountability because she is the mother of two children, 10 and 12, who attend public schools.
“In her school community, Armour-Garb tends not to bring up her professional background, which includes working on New York’s RTTT application and being a point person in developing regulations that defined New York’s APPR system. “Change is hard,” she said. “And testing and accountability are provocative topics that don’t lend themselves to a quick conversation.”
Notice that Armour-Garb is careful not to let anyone in her school community know her role in developing the onerous regulations for the state’s educator evaluator system. A wise decision. More than a third of the principals have signed a petition opposing that system, and if people were not afraid for their jobs, the petition may well have been signed by more than 90% of the state’s principals.
She is right to hide her role in this tightening of the testing noose around the necks of the state’s teachers and principals. She is a lawyer and public-policy consultant, not an educator.
While she asserts that Race to the Top is “research-based,” she fails to mention what part of it is research based. Certainly not the educator evaluation system, which has never been applied successfully anywhere. John King described it as “building a plane in mid-air.” That is not research-based.
